ANNA HAMBURGER.(Obituary)

Anna Hamburger was the place your gaze stopped when you'd just come into a crowded East Side living room, dropped in at a friend's Village gallery opening, arrived at a neighbor's walkup for Christmas cheer, or looked past the surrounding strangers at the theatre and discovered her, there across the narrow theatre lobby, at intermission. Good, you thought, everything's all right now. You looked again, as you moved toward her, waiting for her to spot you as you got closer, and for that breathtaking welcoming smile--her huge, heavy-lidded eyes opening wide--and for her to say your name in greeting ("Raw-juh!" in a woodwind contralto) and put up her face toward yours. Anna, who died last week, at the age of ninety, was the wife of our long-term friend and colleague Philip Hamburger, and wherever she went he came, too. She'd had a long, happy marriage (and two children) to her first husband, the writer Norman Matson, and then this second brilliant go-round. She had ten grandchildren and fourteen great-grands.

Phil and Anna were a couple in the gin-and-tonic, Heloise-and-Abelard sense. You rarely thought of them as anything but two--he in his dark suit, with his curved little smile; she close at hand, with pale lipstick and extraordinary hair. ...